Finally. This is a huge step forward for Drupal. After eschewing OOP practices for a long time, its finally winning over core developers, which will make working with Drupal as a Framework easier in many ways. I copied the announcement below, but you can see that patch and discussion here.

When a prominent developer and contributor lashes out that Drupal is in dire straits, you better listen.  You ought to read his critique of how Drupal core development is stalling, or at least stuck in the mud.  That can't be good news for anyone looking to upgrade to Drupal 7.  My thoughts after the quote.

A much awaited release of PHP maybe coming soon. Find out how you can help contribute.

Discussion on the PHP mail lists and IRC channels in the past few days has been looking positive about an alpha release of PHP 5.4 soon. This will be taken from the "trunk" branch of PHP.

PHP 5.4 is Gathering Momentum (PHP and Oracle: Christopher Jones)

Always tough to line up all the places where text passes through or is stored. HT PHP Developer.org

Character sets can be confusing at the best of times. This post aims to explain the potential problems and suggest solutions.

How to Avoid Character Encoding Problems in PHP « James Cohen

This post describes a small tweak to make to php lint checking via a git pre-commit hook.

Using git hooks to check syntax errors - Tim Akinbo’s Blog

Lessons: Use Cases matter, and programmers (the users in this case) will choose tools that are both simple, in that they are not complicated/over-engineered, and easy to use, requiring little setup and code to accomplish a task.  For parsing data with PHP, constrast using something like SimpleXML or DOMDocument (which is light-years better than where we were in parsing XML just 5 years ago), to just doing json_encode() or json_decode().

While Panels is great for controlling the layout of drupal pages, there are times when you can't use the module to theme a page.  For uncached content, it does introduce some performance overhead into the drupal request change.  It can also be tedious to migrate changes from one environment to the other if you don't export pages and variants to version control.

When you're working in the stock theme layer, the following functions can come in handy.

This is a concise example showing how you can use the Features module to bundle configurations in Drupal into a module.  It's great to see the Drupal community moving towards using code to capture, reuse, and deploy configuration settings.  It's been the biggest pain point in working with Drupal for me.

There's a new release of the the one full-blown IDE that I've managed to stick with.  If Eclipse doesn't fit your style, give Netbeans a spin - I like its inline code completion, the source-code beautifier, and the integration with SVN and Mercurial.  I particularly find the source control usability much better than Eclipse.

Arne Blankerts - part of thePHP.cc, premium PHP consulting and training.